from EarthPhotos.com
Fly south and keep flying, and you'll finally run out of land at Puerto Arenas, Chilean Patagonia on the Strait of Magellan, facing Antarctica. Drive back north to the stunning Torres del Payne, pictured above.
View more photos of Chile on EarthPhotos.com. Here's an excerpt from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey:
A band of cold rain swept over the Hotel Cabo de Hornos, turning the waters of the Strait of Magellan dirty gray. Puerto Arenas’s “oldest and grandest” hotel was, well, it was just a hotel, all of its walls painted a determined mustard. A bare minimum of staff kept the Cabo de Hornos open and we all watched cold squalls spray over the strait.
The Pan American highway stops at Puerto Montt, 816 miles of Chilean coastline to the north, so there are no roads to get down here. There's little tourism because you have to be so determined to get here.
Feliz Navidad. Punta Arenas was closed tight, for we came in on Christmas night.
****
I think I snared the last car for rent in southern Chile.
In the morning I stopped for coffee and touched Magellan’s shiny toe (this was so destiny would bring me back), on the plaza, then I found Hertz.
“Buenos dias. You have a car?”
“No.”
A happy smile.
“If I go to aeropuerto?”
“No.”
I looked across the street. “Budget?”
This “no” betrayed a smug certainty, and at the same time a creeping regret that he wasn’t helping. He allowed that I could always “ask the question” across the street at Budget and furthermore, the man down the street at Santander might have uno auto. He wouldn’t open until ten and it was scarcely 9:30. Still, that was something, so I bid him and a man washing cars adios.
At Budget they had big smiles but no cars.
“For today!?” He acted amazed.
He phoned around, but nothing. At least I had “asked the question.”
I found Tourismo Pehoe and from them got a line on Bus Sur at 13:00 to Puerto Natales, up toward the Torres del Paine park, where we were bound. With that less than ideal alternative, nothing was left but to wait for Santander at 10:00.
*****
It’s hard to imagine how the nearly Antarctic tip of South America came to be known as Tierra del Fuego, or land of fire. It’s likewise hard to imagine being so far from home – so isolated – as Ferdinand Magellan and his crew were, sailing through appalling weather where nobody they’d ever heard of had been, five centuries ago. Especially when huge bonfires appeared onshore.
Tribes called Ona and Yaghan kept them constantly stoked for warmth. The Yaghan wore only the scantest clothing despite the cold.
Canoeists, adept at navigating the labrynthine channels and tributaries around the straits, they hunted the sea and smeared fat over their bodies as protection from the wind and rain. As recently as 1834, on the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin noted, “these people going about naked and barefoot on the snow."
The Ona lived across the strait, on the island I could see through the spray and mist. The books call them fierce warriors who adorned themselves with necklaces and bracelets of bone, shell and tendon, who hunted rats with bow and arrow, and who, wearing heavy furs and leather shoes, intimidated the bare-skinned Yaghan.
Darwin gave them their backhanded due, calling them “wretched lords of this wretched land.”
According to another early European visitor, life hereabouts consisted of 65 unpleasant days per year complimented by 300 days of rain and storms.
With time to kill, I walked to the water, past mongrels outside a Purina warehouse and put my hand in the chilly Strait of Magellan - right there amid the plastic bags and candy wrappers.
*****
I tried the knob at the Santander Car Rental but it wouldn’t turn. The windows were still boarded. Whoops, wait a minute. Soon as I turned the knob a man appeared from six doors down and opened the store and ushered me in. The long and short of it (mostly long, since we did the whole mileage and insurance wrangle without a common language) was that he finally approved the last car in town for me and eventually it appeared, driven by the Hertz car washer(!)
*****
Punta Arenas was 110,000 people, a proper town with a proper town park just across the street, which was the home to the statue of Magellan and its smooth, often-rubbed toe (conveniently located for rubbing), which was mandatory according to the local lore. 2200 kilometers south of Santiago, you take what you get.
One passenger ship was calling just now. Across the strait, looking just about west to east, low hills rose around Bahia Porvenir, Tierra Del Fuego, home of a village of the same name. I couldn’t make it out.
*****
Having rubbed the toe we spent the rest of the day driving to Hosteria Lago Gray. And weren’t we the city folk, speeding our petite white Nissan Saloon across 430 kilometers of utter wilderness as if we were in a hurry.
A wire screen over the windshield was to avoid a crack due to gravel, the rental car man made me understand. But no one else had one, so I gathered this really must have been the last car for rent in town.
We looked silly, I thought, motoring off toward the hills. A 1/4 inch mesh of expanded metal, anchored to the window all around. It extended far enough out for the wipers to operate underneath. A foot-square hole was cut in front of both the driver and the passenger with more mesh hinged over it so that the normal position was open from the top, for city driving, but for your serious gravel roads you could pull a string that reached inside your side window and roll the window up real fast to catch the string and bring the panel down, sealing the whole windshield against rocks and providing you with about a thirty percent view of the world in front of you.
****
A guanaco on a hilltop in the Torres del Payne National Park, Chile, from EarthPhotos.com.
Comments